Come take this wildly popular online 5 week writing class by and for sick and disabled queer and trans Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. In this amazing class, build your skills as a writer, read incredible writing by sick and disabled QTBIPOC writers, build a community of trust and create sacred sick and disabled QTPOC writing space to tell our true life adventure stories of survival, resistance and resilience. Students commit to 4 hours of work a week including a weekly 2 hour class. Feel left out by the inaccessibility of most creative writing spaces? This five week class consists of give once a week two hour classes, that you can do from the comfort of your own chair/ bed/ car/ wherever! Homework assignments can be done at your own pace. Classes are held in PiratePad and a shared GoogleDrive folder. (Internet connectivity is needed.) The class is text based and accessible to folks who are Deaf/HOH/ non voice/verbal communicators.

Wondering if you're disabled? To me, disability encompasses folks with physical differences, folks with chronic illness, folks who are Crazy/mentally ill/ psych survivors, folks who are neurodiverse or cognitively different, folks who are Deaf or hard of hearing, and those of us who are some or all of the above.

To apply, please complete the registration form below and email it to brownstargirl @gmail.com . This and a $40 deposit holds your spot. Please email and paypal to brownstargirl@gmail.com, marked as "to friends and family."

About the teacher: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is in love with teaching writing and performance as as a form of liberation for badass oppressed people. Her teaching philosophy is rooted in the words of the great June Jordan, who once said, "All my life, I have tried to remember just how much I hated school, and why." She started teaching queer, trans and Two Spirit youth writing through Supporting Our Youth Toronto's Pink Ink program in 2001, winning the City of Toronto Community Service to Youth Award for this work in 2004 and helping nurture Pink Ink's award winning zine, 10 Reasons to Riot, which won Best Zine in Toronto in 2006. In 2005, she and Gein Wong co-founded Toronto's Asian Arts Freedom School, a community-controlled school teaching writing, performance and radical Asian/Pacific Islander history to Asian/Pacific young people in Toronto. She has been proud to see Pink Ink and Freedom School youth publish their books, tour the world and become badass teachers. In 2007, she moved back to the U.S. and studied community-based poetic teaching through U.C. Berkeley's June Jordan's Poetry for the People Program, culminating in teaching for and being P4P's visiting writer from 2009-2010. She has taught in living rooms and college campuses and everywhere in between, and loves and believes in the delicious liberation of places to learn and live freely outside traditional school systems.

In addition, Leah is a queer disabled Sri Lankan cis femme writer, performer and organizer. The author of the Lambda Award winning Love Cake and Consensual Genocide and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities her work has appeared in the anthologies Dear Sister, Undoing Border Imperialism, Stay Solid, Persistence: Still Butch and Femme, Yes Means Yes, Visible: A Femmethology, Homelands, Colonize This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Bitchfest, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Brazen Femme, Femme and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over The World.

Wth Cherry Galette, she co-founded Mangos With Chili, North America's performance incubator for Two Spirit, queer and trans people of color performance artists, and is a lead artist with Sins Invalid, the Bay Area-based performance incubator on disability and sexuality. In 2010 she was named one of the Feminist Press' “40 Feminists Under 40 Who Are Shaping the Future" and she is one of the the 2013 Autostraddle Alternative Hot 105. She has taught, performed and lectured across North America, Sri Lanka and Australia. She studied poetry with Suheir Hammad and creative nonfiction with Elmaz Abinadar at Voices of Our Nations, a writers of color residency. Her third book of poetry, Bodymap, will be published by TSAR in March 2015.